Bees in a Tin will feature talks and workshops from key makers and thinkers from around the country as well as two panel sessions for audience questions. If you’re interested in the spaces where the arts, science, technology, and games crash into one another, apologise, and then buy each other a drink: then this is for you.

We’re also very excited to have a keynote commission from Sarah Angliss:

According to Sarah, the stage is a tricky place to deploy a machine with an unusual interface. Your audience may be encountering the interface for the first time. They’ll have to grasp its function as the music unfolds, even though they can only see and hear it in action, rather than get their own hands on it. These days, musicians often have to face the challenge of laptop-based interfaces, where so much of the function is embedded in invisible, intangible code. As Sarah talks about these issues and her experience with unusual machines on stage, she looks at the importance of ‘coupling’ – in particular, the audience’s sense of cause and effect between a musician’s actions and sound. What are we gaining – or losing – by loosening this coupling? Does it matter if the audience have no intuitive sense of the musician’s influence on the music? And how can we deploy coupling to turn any gig into an unforgettable event – one which could never be replaced simply by listening to recorded music at home.

Rather than alter the process, I was interested in using different raw materials: rather that using bought-in standardised powder of controlled composition, particle size and everything else, I wanted to use something with more of a human element about it. Something with a history.

The day science/night science text that was to be printed is discssed in more detail in this post.

Bearing in mind my recent crises centering around (amongst other things) what characterised my best/more interesting work and the gradual admission that it wasn’t my more craft-oriented stuff, I chose to use some of my old ceramic works as the source material.

During the course of researching the screen-printing process and investigating different binding materials, it looked like the other materials in the ink would obscure the presence of the crushed ceramics.

I’m no longer planning to use screen-printing, but will instead use the ceramic powder in a more sculptural way…

April 28, 2006

One of the buildings where I’m based as part of the ISP thing is the NetShape Centre. Basically where a load of industry-focused research is done into trying to make components as close to their final shape first-time ’round without having to do any further finishing or processing. The thing is though, its front wall is almost entirely windows and it looks absolutley stunning at night:

At night the building is illuminated… and deserted. But there’s still a sense that things are happening. This is probably partly because it’s stuffed full of all sorts of recognisably scientific and technological equipment, however, I think that the main contributing factors are all the pipes and wires around the place. Maybe this gives a sense of movement and of processes churning away.

You can feel it.

Right from the start I’d harboured a desire to use this space somehow, but it wasn’t until about 5 months into my time here that the perfect project materialised.

Actually, it’s a project that’s been incubating for 4 years…

Francois Jacob

Within this was a quote from the autobiography of a Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist:

Day science employs reasoning that meshes like gears… One admires its majestic arrangement as that of a da Vinci painting or a Bach fugue. One walks about it as in a French formal garden… Night science, on the other hand, wanders blindly. It hesitates, stumbles, falls back, sweats, wakes with a start. Doubting everything… It is a workshop of the possible…where thought proceeds along sensuous paths, tortuous streets, most often blind alleys.François JacobThe statue within: An Autobiography, New York, 1988, p296

I have carried these words around with me for a long time and they resonate on all sorts of levels.

The NetShape Centre provides the perfect setting to use these words beyond the obvious link to the day and night thing.

If I remember correctly, Boden’s book was looking at the similarities and contrasts between creativity as seen from an artistic viewpoint and creativity as seen from a scientific viewpoint. I can very much see both aspects of the quoted passage within my own work. Firstly within the context of a (percieved!) art/science dichotmy and later as different stages I regularly go through within my art practice.

Do the people within the building experience the same thing?

I like the way the use of these words here hint at the infallible(?) scientists just blundering along like the rest of us.

In addition to this, I now learn that Jacob conducted work on feedback witin enzymes. This links in nicely with the idea of responding to your environment and, by extension, the whole notion of residencies.

So…
The words of Day Science and Night Science will be integrated with the architecture of the NetShape Centre.

April 9, 2006

One day, at a time when various other projects had stalled somewhat, I found myself over in the other side of the building. Thinking I’d grab something to eat, I wandered into Pauline’s.

For want of a better term, Pauline was the Department’s resident tea-lady. Tea, coffeee, sandwiches and the usual assortment of crisps and chocolate bars.

When I walked in though, she told me she was retiring at the end of the week.

I felt I needed to use the next few days to document the end of an era: having worked there for over 20 years, Pauline was an institution.

She told me the story of her time in the Department and we reminisced about “sunset tuna” sandwiches and Children in Need collections. She often talked about the students as being “her kids”. She’d even remembered me after 6 years!

However, in the the time since I had been there, the urn and the table bearing rows of food had all been stripped out and replaced with a couple of vending machines. Even the cash box had been replaced with an electronic till…

This was the result of catering being centralised and the ensuing rulings over Health and Safety. No more hand-made sandwiches. No more fresh(ish) tea. Apparently things had been pretty dire over the last couple of years, but Pauline stuck it out ’till she could retire.

I made some sound recordings and took a few photos, but it seemed the most appropriate way of marking the event was to make a commemorative mug.

My main area of enquiry is centred around interactions between people and place: often using tools and strategies from areas such as pervasive games and physical computing to set up frameworks for exploration.

If you'd like to commission me or collaborate with me, please get in touch via the contact page.

General blog contents released under a Creative Commons
by-nc-sa license.
Artworks and other projects copyright Nicola Pugh 2003-2018, all rights reserved.
If in doubt, ask.
The theme used on this WordPress-powered site started off life as Modern Clix, by Rodrigo Galindez.